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Women who shell cashew nuts for as little as £2 a day are regularly left with agonising acid burns while trying to meet British demands for the snack, a new report has found.

As vegetarian and vegan diets increase in the UK – whether for health, environmental or animal rights reasons – shoppers are said to be hoovering up nuts, eating 17,000 tonnes in 2016, a huge 35 per cent increase compared to 2012.

But according to the Daily Mail, there is a human cost to producing the millions of cashews needed, which are predominantly shelled by hand in India, Brazil, Mozambique and Vietnam.

The youngest nut sheller is Suganthi Ramalingami, just 13, who has taken time off school to work (Picture: Emily Clark)

Some of the women shelling cashews choose not to wear gloves as they slow down their work (Picture: Emily Clark)

The workers are paid by the kilo, but some only make around £2.15 a day (Picture: Emily Clark)

Some of the women shelling cashews choose not to wear gloves as they slow down their work (Picture: Emily Clark)

Journalist Emily Clark visited a cashew nut processor in southern India where shellers reported painful injuries caused by cardol and anacardic acids that lie between the two layers of hard shell on a cashew nut.

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Some 500,000 people work in India’s cashew nut industry – nearly all women – who are paid as little as £2 a day for the arduous labour with no contracts, no guarantee of steady income and no pension or holiday pay.

Many of the women were not given gloves and those that were chose not to wear them as it slowed their work down – they are paid by volume.

One nut sheller, Pushpa Gandhi, 30, told the newspaper she is covered in scars from her work shelling cashews but makes just 200 rupees a day, or £2.15.

‘Today when we go home and wash, we will see the boils on our skin. It takes about a week for them to heal. But as the old ones heal, new ones keep coming,’ she said.

The charity Traidcraft Exchange blames the poor working conditions on European buyers — including UK supermarkets — they claim ‘aggressively push down prices’, forcing cashew companies to hire cheap labour.

Nurse Uma Jayamurthi told the paper she was seeing increasing numbers of patients in the past year who have chopped off the top of a finger.

Some 500,000 people – mostly women – work in the cashew nut industry in India (Picture: Emily Clark)

The burns on the workers’ hands harden into blisters that scar (Picture: Emily Clark)

A local medical centre found around 40 per cent of patients come to see nurses with cashew related injuries (Picture: Emily Clark)

Around 40 per cent of patients at the centre have cashew-related injuries. ‘The main reason people come here is when the cashew acid goes under their nails and it gets infected,’ says Uma.

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But she adds they only come when the pain is ‘unbearable’, because of the cost.

The cashew boom in recent years is being put down to changing diets in the west.

In April 2018, a comparethemarket.com survey found that the number of vegans in the UK had risen to a whopping 3.5 million.

The Vegan Society reports a much lower figure of 600,000, which is far less significant, but still represents a four-fold rise in four years.

As well a protein-rich snack, many dairy-free ‘cheeses’ loved by vegans are typically made using cashews, as well as creamy sauces used in pasta dishes, Emily said.

Some workers have reported losing fingers and thumbs carrying out the work (Picture: Emily Clark)

Cashew nut consumption has increased in Britain in the past few years as more people take up a vegan diet (Picture: Emily Clark)

Dairy-free ‘cheese’ or ‘cream’ options often use cashew nuts in their creation (Picture: Emily Clark)

But it’s not as simple as boycotting the nut altogether, as the millions of cashew workers around the world rely on keeping their jobs.

Instead calls have been made to supermarkets to review their supply chains and make sure workers are being paid a fair wage.

All major UK supermarkets, including Sainsbury’s, Asda and Tesco, have voluntarily signed up to the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) to ensure safe and hygienic working conditions, no child labour, living wages and regular employment is guaranteed to suppliers around the world.

But Fiona Gooch, of Traidcraft Exchange, says producers ‘are under too much [price] pressure’ to comply with the agreements.

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She says finance experts should cross-check wage slips with a sample of workers, and supermarkets should send health and safety teams to inspect factories.

The British Retail Consortium said supermarkets have ‘robust safety and welfare standards’ to support suppliers and ‘are conscious of the problems that exist in parts of India’s cashew industry’.

British companies will only work with suppliers who provide decent working conditions, a spokesman said.